Bloodthirsty Liberal

This is a few days old, but he’s part of our beat, so…:

President Hugo Chavez is praising Carlos the Jackal, the imprisoned Venezuelan once notorious for a series of Cold War-era bombings, assassinations and hostage dramas, saying he was a “revolutionary fighter” and not a terrorist.

The Venezuelan president lauded Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — during a speech Friday night saying: “I defend him. It doesn’t matter to me what they say tomorrow in Europe.”

Ramirez is serving a life sentence in a French prison for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informant.

He has testified that he led a 1975 attack that killed three people at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, Austria. He also has been linked to the 1976 hijacking of an Air France jet en route to Uganda.

“They accuse him of being a terrorist, but Carlos really was a revolutionary fighter,” Chavez said during a televised speech to socialist politicians from various countries, who applauded.

I don’t care what the say in Europe tomorrow either, but let’s look at a few of the Hefty Jefe’s other friends:

Chavez sought to defend other leaders he said are wrongly labeled “bad guys” internationally, including Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chavez called both of them brothers and said he now wonders whether Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was truly as brutal as he was reputed to be.

“We thought he was a cannibal,” Chavez said, referring to Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. “I have doubts. … I don’t know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot.”

But of course there’s one reason above all others for Tubby the Two-Bit Dictator to love and admire Carlos the Jackal:

Chavez […] called him “one of the great fighters of the Palestine Liberation Organization” at the time.

Yes, Venezuelan solidarity with Arabs has a long and storied tradition. They are neighbors, after all.